Niches
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French New Wave
At the end of the 1950s a circle of Paris critics put down their pens and picked up cameras: the street, daylight, borrowed money, friends.
1950s · 1960s -
New Hollywood
For one American decade the studios lost their certainty and handed directors final cut.
1960s · 1980s -
Italian Neorealism
Italy filmed itself in the ruins of the war: real streets, non-professional actors, the light that happened to be there.
1940s · 1950s -
Japanese Animation
Animation in Japan grew as an industry rather than a school, which is why its range runs from domestic drama to metaphysics without changing register.
1970s · 2020s -
Parallel Cinema
An Indian cinema that grew up in Bengal alongside the commercial flood rather than inside it.
1950s · 1970s -
Italian American
American films about Italian-American life by directors who grew up inside it and refused to sentimentalize it.
1970s · 1990s -
Giallo
Named for the yellow-jacketed crime paperbacks Italy read on trains, and staged like them: black gloves, impossible architecture, colour pushed far past what the scene calls for.
1960s · 1980s -
New German Cinema
A generation that called the West German film industry morally bankrupt, said so in a manifesto, and built a cinema from nothing.
1970s · 1980s -
Japanese Golden Age
Through the 1950s the Japanese studios produced at industrial volume, and the directors inside them made some of the most durable films anyone has.
1950s · 1960s -
Soviet Sci-Fi
Under Soviet censorship the science fiction turned inward: the voyage is a pretext, and what the ship arrives at is conscience and memory.
1920s · 1980s -
German Expressionism
Weimar Germany built its film sets as painted distortions: shadow used as architecture, a crooked wall for a crooked thought.
1920s -
Cinéma du Look
A French run of the 1980s that put surface first: saturated colour, night cities, advertising light.
1980s · 1990s -
The French Polar
The gangster film as one director settled it: trench coats, rooms with nothing in them, men who barely speak because the code is not up for discussion.
1950s · 1970s -
Japanese New Wave
A generation that refused the humanism of the masters ahead of it: sex, crime, class and the war, in forms as disordered as the subjects.
1960s · 1970s -
Dogme 95
A vow of chastity, published in Copenhagen in 1995: shoot on location, hold the camera, add no light, no music, no genre, and take no director credit.
1990s · 2000s -
Soviet Montage
In the decade after the revolution, a handful of Soviet directors argued that a film’s meaning lives in the cut between two shots rather than inside either one.
1920s · 1930s -
Slow Cinema
Films that hold the shot past comfort, until the waiting becomes the subject.
1970s · 2010s -
The Essay Film
A film that thinks out loud: a voice, often the maker’s own, argues with the images instead of acting in front of them.
1920s · 2000s -
The Hollywood Musical
The studio musical as a school: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers at RKO in the 1930s, then the unit Arthur Freed ran at MGM, where Minnelli, Donen and Gene Kelly let song and dance carry the story.
1930s · 1960s